Today’s on-line “The American Interest” carries a greatly expanded version of my blog of Feb. 25 (scroll down for Shostakovich and Ives):...

Books continue to be written about what it was like to live in Germany under Hitler. I wonder if any of the authors have auditioned...

For this weekend’s “Wall Street Journal” I have written an impassioned encomium for William Dawson’s thrilling “Negro Folk Symphony” of...

Looking for another book not long ago, I stumbled upon Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. In 1987, it was a national...

During the cultural Cold War, President John F. Kennedy delivered eloquent speeches claiming that only “free societies” fostered great...

PostClassical Ensemble’s “Cultural Fusion: The Gamelan Experience,” presented on January 23, 2019, at the Washington National Cathedral,...

The Bolshoi Theatre The formidable Norwegian soprano Lisa Davidsen, making her Metropolitan Opera debut in Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades,...

“America’s forbidden composer” is Arthur Farwell (1872-1952), leader of the “Indianists” movement in music. As I’ve discussed in a recent...

Curtain call for “Porgy and Bess” with Rouben Mamoulian in glasses The latest installment of Conrad L. Osborne’s indispensable opera blog...

— I — “Arthur Farwell is probably the most neglected composer in our history. . . . At the turn of the century no one wrote music with...

Of Joseph Stalin the culture-czar, Solomon Volkov comments: “People underestimate the level of control that Stalin maintained. I once...

Kevin Deas Kevin Deas, the exceptional bass-baritone who is the anonymous “Porgy” of my previous blog, has written to me at greater...

Sidney Poitier as Porgy Of the interesting emails I received in response to my American Scholar review of Porgy and Bess, the most...

To read my review of the Met’s new “Porgy and Bess,” just posted online by “The American Scholar,” click here. It begins: That the...

William Dawson Picking up on my American Scholar piece, Tom Huizenga of National Public Radio interviewed me about the fate of black...

William Dawson In 1893 Antonin Dvorak, teaching in New York City, predicted that a “great and noble school” of American classical music...

George Szell “As admirers of Horowitz’s musicianship and resilience, we must face these realities remembering that, in the end, he loaded...

It’s a truism that, as aesthetic movements go, the visual arts get there first. Think of Impressionism, which didn’t begin to inflect...

The annals of the Harlem Renaissance include heated debate over the practice of turning African-American spirituals into concert songs....

Reviewing Sony Classical’s invaluable new Oscar Levant tribute in the current “Los Angeles Review of Books,” I write: “That Levant was...